Writing in XML is not easy for mortals like myself, but I wanted to use a docbook as it's the correct format. To get around this problem, I have used a text file and asciidoc to generate the xml and then the html. Their is a simple script containing the commands used for conversion.

/cvsroot/morphix/how_tos/docbook_html/prepare_html.sh

The xmlto html occasionally may fail if your syntax is wrong in text file, but this is quite rare. Alas no one can avoid death and (syn)taxes.